“How odd these Sicilians are!” reflected Jane, as they drove. “An incomprehensible mixture to an Anglo-Saxon. For example one finds almost universal open-hearted gentleness and courtesy, and yet the Mafia holds the whole land in a grip of iron—a dangerous, murderous, secret society as widespread as the population, yet never betrayed, and uncontrollable by any power, even so popular and so democratic a one as the present government.” “Yes; their attitude to life is as puzzling as the face they turn toward death,” agreed Peripatetica, remembering that almost every other building in Taormina and many in Palermo wore nailed to the door a broad strip of mourning—often old and tattered—on which was printed “Per mio Frate,” or “Per mia Madre”—that even a newspaper kiosk had worn weeds—“Per mio Padre.” At that very moment there passed a cheerful hearse, all glass and gilding, wreathed with fresh flowers into a gay dancing nosegay, and hung with fluttering mauve streamers which announced in golden letters that the white coffin within enclosed all that was mortal of some one’s beloved sister Giuseppina. It might have been a catafalque of some Spirit of Spring, so many, so sweet, so daintily gracious were the blooming boughs that accompanied Giuseppina to her last resting-place.... 261And yet they had but just come from the grim horrors of that crypt of the Cappuccini!... La Favorita, curiously, is one of the few monuments of beauty or charm left by that long reign of the Spanish monarchs of Sicily, which, with some mutations, lasted for about six hundred years. They loaded the land with a weight of many churches and convents, yet what one goes to see is what was done by the Greeks, the Moslems, and the Normans. La Favorita is not old, as one counts age in that immemorial land of the High Gods. A slight century or so of age it has, being built for the villegiatura of Ferdinando IV. at the period when the Eighteenth Century affected a taste in Chinoiseries, bought blue hawthorn jars, ate from old Pekin plates, set up lacquered cabinets, and built Pagoda-esque pleasure houses. The Château is but a flimsy and rather vulgar example of the taste of the day, but the Eighteenth Century often planted delicious gardens, and the pleached allées, the ilex avenues, the fountains and plaisances of La Favorita, make an adorable park for modern Palermo, having by time and the years grown into a majestic richness of triumphant verdure.